What a wild ride it’s been. As we begin 2021, I’m living out my life-long dream as a residential interior designer while juggling my most important job as a stay-at-home-mom. Mix in the hangover of the most challenging year EVER and the result is a little less than complete chaos. This past year brought some of my biggest challenges. Those challenges also pushed me to finally tackle some of those “I’d love to do that at some point in my life” ideas before they floated away. This is how I got here.
Photo Credit: Brittany Adams Photography
In February 2020, my husband and I were celebrating our oldest son’s birthday. Just two days later our second son was born. After only a week back home from the hospital, my husband loses his job. Standing in the kitchen, overcome with anxiety, we wondered, “What do we do now?”
Less than a month later, Rhode Island is in lockdown due to COVID-19. My design business comes to a screeching halt. Scary isn’t the word. Terrifying is more appropriate. I had a choice: allow the fear to take over, or take what life had dropped in my lap and refocus my energy.
Lockdown allowed me (and everyone else) plenty of time to sit and think about life. Cliched? Maybe. But it’s true. In moments like these, I always think about my grandmother. She was an artist who nurtured my love of art from an early age. Before she passed away, she said something to me that still rings in my ears. “You’re going to have a beautiful life.” To this day, when I’m handed one of life’s challenges or I’m feeling a moment of gratitude, I think of her words.
Juggling a design business and raising two young boys is no small task. My daily activities consist of streamlining life at home all the while keeping things beautiful, even when life gets ugly. 2020 started for me being an eight month pregnant mom, wrangling an almost three-year-old son, wrapping up design projects before heading out on maternity leave. What I thought was difficult in January seemed like the good old days by the time March rolled around.
Our home sweet home, an 1880s Colonial. Sold October 2020.
Photo Credit: John Fell Photography
2020 unveiled a need for houses to become homes more than ever, and I’m hoping I can assist in that endeavor. I spent years offering freelance interior design services while working my 9-5 throughout my 20s and into my 30s. Fast forward to buying my first house, getting engaged and married, then starting a family. Creating my own design business to work around my new family life became a requirement.
I’ve always been a glass half full kind of person. I tried to keep that mindset as 2020 got going. After the fog of newborn land lifted in the spring, my husband and I were able to have some serious conversations on how to survive the year. Plans to sell our house weren’t on our horizon for another year or two but what initially seemed like a grim year for real estate quickly flipped. How could we get our house ready for the market? There was no other time like 2020 to pull it off. There were major ups and downs, including losing our beloved family dog in the midst of it all, but in the end we did it.
In 2021, I plan to share these beautiful life lessons including how to tackle a project like selling your home, surviving motherhood, and sprinkling in my interior projects and green thumb advice. Stay tuned for what’s to come and thanks in advance for following along!
“Lindy has been indispensable in making our houses feel like homes.”